Poor St Paul: with, ‘Wives be subject to your husbands’, he has a pretty bad reputation as a misogynist. I will try to show, however, that examination of his writings proves that this reputation is undeserved and to indicate how it has grown. So that it has become what Dr Caird describes as: ‘one of the most firmly held of the prejudices and half truths which together comprise the biblical semiliteracy of the man in the street’.

I cannot here go into a detailed exegesis of all the extracts from St Paul’s letters in which women are mentioned, but one central point must be made clearly from the start. St Paul had one main concern. That was, to preach the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. His mission was not concerned with women as women, or with their place in society or even in the local churches. It was not as a sociologist that Paul wrote but as an apostle. He was concerned above all to preach what Christ had done for all mankind. He was concerned to show people how a new relationship with God could be found through being in Christ. The new relationship with God came through the new covenant established by Christ’s death and resurrection. Through baptism into Christ, people were given the new seal; just as circumcision had been the old seal of God’s relationship with his old people, and the law had been their relationship with God. There would of course be repercussions in social relationships which would follow from the realisation of the new relationship with God through Christ. But if we look at Paul from a particular standpoint: what has he to say about women only?, we are asking a question which he did not ask.